Beyond discipline:Discipline and lenience in religious practice. Introduction.

Questions of discipline are, today, no less ubiquitous than when under Foucault’s renowned scrutiny, but what does ‘discipline’ in diverse religious systems actually entail? In this article, we take ‘lenience’ rather than discipline as a starting point and compare its potential, both structural and ideological, in religious contexts where disciplinary flexibility shores up greater encompassing projects of moral perfectionism as opposed to those contexts in which disciplinary flexibility is a defining feature in its own right. We argue that lenience provides religious systems with a vital flexibility that is necessary to their reproduction and adaptation to the world. By taking a ‘systems’ perspective on ethnographic discussions of religious worlds, we proffer fresh observations on recent debates within the anthropology of religion on ‘ethics’, ‘failure’, and the nature of religious subjects

RESPOSTA AO ARTIGO DE MANOELA CARPENEDO: "PIEDOSAS E POLICULTURAIS: CONVERSÃO, AGÊNCIA E TORMENTO MORAL ENTRE MULHERES EVANGÉLICAS JUDAIZANTES NO BRASIL"

teste

Marriage, knowledge, and morality among Catholic peasants in northeast Brazil.

This thesis is an ethnographic study of marriage, religious practice, and concepts of morality among a group of peasant farmers in Northeast Brazil. It investigates how, over the individual life-course, concepts of moral accountability develop and change, and how people negotiate such changes through specific discourses on labour and suffering. Such discourses stem from a particularised Catholic ideology which grows out of the social and economic history of the region. The existential problem of living both morally and productively in the world manifests itself most explicitly in local understandings of marriage; revealing a perceived tension between the states of innocence and knowledge. The thesis shows how this tension feeds into a heightened concern over the various stages of transformation in a person's life, particularly the transformation from childhood to adolescence. Tied to such transformation is concern about the correct moral management of knowledge, which is founded upon the gendered performance of sacrifice. However, it emphasises that the passage from innocence to knowledge is as fraught and inevitable for men as it is for women, and that while men's and women's physical expressions of this problem differ, they are ultimately bound and shaped by the same moral dilemmas. Thus the thesis argues that while the analysis of gender difference is an important task, it should not obscure local understandings of the relationship between the sexes that downplay concepts of difference while emphasising the basic similarity of moral concerns. In this way, the thesis offers a contrast to much of the literature on Catholic and Orthodox peasantries that has made gender difference the central focus and defining trope in understanding marriage, religious practice, and concepts of morality

When God talks back about When God talks back

Comment on Luhrmann, Tanya. 2012. When God talks back: Understanding the American Evangelical relationship with God. New York: Alfred E. Knopf